It's definitely a change, but I have to say I prefer this second season to the first. The stories were slightly more complex and had a vaguely more adult feel to them. This is especially so of the origin story in the first two episodes of season two. The art on those was pretty good and the story very much like a Spidey comic. I love the backgrounds in this series, the colors are vibrant and intoxicating often making up for admittedly lackluster animation.
Now after that beginning things get strange. But knowing that fantasy masters like Lin Carter on the writing and Gray Morrow on the art design are at the helm I can't be surprised all that much that Spidey spent most of the season out of the city and in some vague jungle/alien setting up to his webs in plants and weird bat-things. One thing I noticed was that many of the stories really threw curveballs, in that Spidey would begin his adventure normally enough with crime and thugs but then there would be a shift and he'd find himself in the future, underground, or on a bizarre island somewhere.
I consider these adventures to be similar to the kinds of adventures that Spidey would have in Marvel Team-Up in which he'd often venture into territories radically different from the classic big city crime story he's rooted in. The MTU Spidey would travel in time, go into space, venture into lost worlds and do all manner of things bizarre by his standards. This second season had that kind of feel to it.
Here a dozen things I learned watching this second season of Spider-Man:
1. The sky is often green and always always dramatic as if a storm is about to erupt.
2. Purple gorillas are seen by the criminal set as effective disguises for some reason. Maybe it's a DC thing.
3. Spidey can pilot experimental jetplanes and has ready access to them on a whim, and no one misses them when they fly away.
4. Mole Men are ridiculously stupid, getting duped by the same criminal in two episodes. And they like to gong a lot.
5. Giant doors are common in many alien landscapes, as if Kong himself were on the other side.
6. Spidey loves to swing and swing and swing and swing and swing though the city, often attaching his webline to no discernable object.
7. Villains are most often green, the sure sign of villainy in the Bakshiverse.
8. Peter Parker plays baseball.
9. Parker sure hangs out with a lot of different girls, but I'm guessing he's not a FWB (Friend with Benefits), accounting for that gloomy puss he wears most of the time.
10. Manhattan is a remarkably sturdy cityscape and can survive mutltiple sinkings of various buildings and even detaching from the earth and flying into the sky.
11. Martians look amazingly like ancient gods of Norse and Greco-Roman mythology.
12. The power of flight is achieved by putting a blender on your head.
Ralph Bakshi produced a wacky cartoon, that's so bizarre that I wouldn't mind watching it again in a few years. The stories are at once patterned and unpredicatable. Spidey seems mostly trusted by the police, even admired by them save for the last episode when inexplicably he's seen as a baddie and a threat. The villains are cackling madmen, but intreresting looking by and large.
Things happen in the Bakshiverse that require no explanation, they just are. And in the context of these stories, I can accept that. You might even dub this season of Spidey stories his "Weird Adventures" and be very close to capturing the feeling they have.
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